What anchors us?
Some of us have deep intimacy with a number of places, people, routines, parts of ourselves…
and then these things can change, intimacies shift.
What does it mean to be intimate with the flow of life?
How do we know if we are intimate or anchored?
It can shift from moment to moment, yet we find it in retracing our steps,
remembering, redoing, revisiting,
places, habits,
reconnecting with people we’ve known a long time.
What is intimacy once it’s passed?
People, places, ourselves,
all change and keep changing, with little to be captured.
But some people, things and places in ourselves stay more or less the same,
some places only change gradually.
The essence of things is unwavering,
yet can also be hard to access.
These questions are on my mind as I travel through areas I’ve lived and visited over and over again, once a rolling stone, once anchored, once, once, once…
People and places gather and constellate in my mind like a large multidimensional many sided star, expanding slightly and then condensing, always to expand again.
So how will we know when it’s over? Or when something new will begin? Or when it’s time to anchor or roll or disperse in the sky?
How will we know when we’ll see friends or lovers or blood relatives again when we count time on different fingers each month and year, decade and moment, day and millennium, century and week? How will we know?
Stars will tell us things sometimes, and then they’ll go dark and silent, blending in with the sky or just being unseen due to clouds and things.
Anything that stays the same or is saved (any object, place, habit, soul, feature), serves to place us, yet too many saved things can bog us down.
Too many saved “friends” and “family” and “homes” and things can make the current ones taste bland.
So we keep sifting, sifting, not necessarily letting anything go officially, entirely and forever, but letting most things go “for now”.
And what does that leave us with? A whole lot of nothing. Things that may as well be not things. People that may as well not exist, places we may as well not know our way around, memories we may as well not have, sides of our personality that may never be expressed again, ways of feeling we can’t even remember.
And it goes on like this. Old old things, old old memories, old old friends, lovers, family relations.
We smile sometimes at the relief of it all, and then it comes back to us as we backtrack through our lives which start to feel like eternity with so many invisible stars, so much infinitude.
It might not matter how we’re anchored.
Intimacy might be a useless, ever flowing endeavor, constantly slipping through our fingers as their creases get a little deeper and a little deeper but it’s all too slow to notice.
